Anthropic: We know our AI is not reliable enough to be used in military action.
Trump/Hegseth: What should we say?
Altman: Tell they you're smarter than they are, and you know it will work.
Trump/Hegseth: Hey, Anthropic, we're smarter than you are. Trust us!
There are a lot of people here posting that the Ribbon is a bad design, and I agree with them 110%. But that's not the only thing that's wrong with Word: it also distributes controls all around the edges, and unless you use it day in and day out, and use those distributed controls, it's a pain finding them.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice has copied this bad UI from Microsoft. I'm looking at LO Writer now, and in addition to the menu at the top, there's a sidebar on the right with eight or ten indecipherable icons (one of which looks like a hamburger menu, except it isn't). There's a Find box near the bottom with its controls. And on the status bar, there's a zoom (I think) gizmo on the right, something that looks like pages with folded-over corners next to that, a few more boxes or something, a page style chooser(?), and an image of a 3 1/2" floppy diskette on the left. I think I can get rid of all this cruft, but why is it there in the first place? I certainly don't use most of those things very often (except search, for which ^F works fine, thank you!), and they just waste space.
The traditional menu *could* be made context sensitive. So that's missing the point. The point (for me, and I think for a lot of other ribbon-haters) is that icons are mostly indecipherable, you have to look at the text label (or worse, mouse-over) to know what they do. Whereas we all understand words. (If we didn't, we wouldn't be using *Word*.)
Egypt gave up hieroglyphics after the mostly alphabetic Hieratic (and later Demotic) writing system came into use. Two millennia later, it took the Rosetta stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
We grew up with an alphabetic writing system, why on earth would Microsoft want to replace that with indecipherable icons?
The Ribbon is *exactly* why I switched from MsOffice to LibreOffice as soon as I retired. (I had to use Ms for my employer.)
There was an article in Washington Post a few weeks ago about the cost or running lights in a room when you're gone. The article said it was no more than a couple pennies per day, and the calculations work out.
Of course there soon won't be any pennies (in the US), and I turn off the lights anyway.
What could possibly go wrong? Well, that was anticipated in a 1963 SciFi story in Analog magazine (where else?): Walt and Leigh Richmond, "Where I Wasn't Going". Read it here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cach...
Well, if super intelligence does come from an LLM, lilq1d will be wearing his sombrero on his waist.
I believe what the OP is saying is that this
"The mods all became power-trippers obsessed with closing questions and keeping people in line, rather than the original purpose of helping people."
This. (Not sure about all the mods, but at least some.)
No, I've not seen pointless questions there. I have seen pointless moderation (closing what I considered to be good questions--and not just mine).
"...Stack Overflow improved moderator efficiency and closed questions more aggressively." I don't know about moderator efficiency, but it got to the point where I could hardly ask a question that wasn't closed by a moderator. I pushed back on one and got it re-opened, but the work to do so left me not wanting to ask another question.
"If you want to study the effects on underwater basket weaving on indigenous gender fluid mollusks....then you pay for it on your own time. I think that might cut a LOT of waste out.....let's try to only train for things that will benefit society and make the student some money after school." Can you say "clueless"? I didn't think so. You're repeating an old saw that wasn't true then, and isn't true now.
The comment says it all. We have not seen the last of these AI-improved scams.
"Trump's America seems bound and determined to become a second-rate tech power." Trump's motto: Make America Little Again.
"The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down." -- H.L. Mencken
